Thursday, September 13, 2007

Interestingly enough, I rarely see this from Guy-fans.

I adore Kyle Rayner and think he's the best all-around Lantern, I think John Stewart is made of awesome and needs more exposure, but there's nothing that sours your pro-Kyle or pro-John post for me more than trashing Hal Jordan.

It doesn't need to be done. He's a vastly amusing character with a history behind him that a lot of us like, and the whole franchise is set up so that they can all be used at once.

And by the way, those Hal-fans you hate who love to trash the "rival" characters, your favorites? You sound just like them when they do it, and I'm fucking sick of it.

What is this? 12 fucking years and this fandom hasn't changed a bit? Did this happen in the 70s when John showed up? The 60s when they did that alternate timeline story with Guy?

"You know, that Hal Jordan character is so much better than the old rich-boy lazy Alan Scott they had in the 40s, I'm glad he got replaced. What were those idiots thinking in the 40s?""You're kidding, right? Hal's a fucking moron and a Lensmen ripoff. They're only using him because Broome can't tell a good mystery, he has to bring outer space in it!""Oh, that does it! I'm getting out my stationary and starting a "Bring back Alan!" letter campaign!"

Hawkman fans do too have this problem, thank you VERY much--I'm a huge fan of the Silver Age, outer-space cop Katar Hol, with his wife Shayera (you can tell they're married because of the earrings), and I've been quietly fuming for ages now over the way that the Golden Age Hawkman has just steamrollered over decades of continuity and we Katar Hol fans don't even get a look in.

Compared to that injustice, Green Lantern fans should be cheering in rapture. At least no matter which GL of Earth you like (Hal, Guy, John, Kyle or Alan), they're still an active super-hero doing their part for justice. Katar Hol? He's a fading echo of a memory in Carter Hall's brain somewhere. Yes, just what I want to read about.

(This, by the way, is the transformation that 'Showcase Presents' has wreaked upon me. I can now actually rant about my favorite Hawkman. Thank you, affordable black-and-white reprint volumes!)

I blame Wizard Magazine for this sort of thing, far more than anyone else. Every six months, for pretty much the entire Marz run, they would run a Hal Vs. Kyle article, fanning the flames. This was when Wizard still had power and influence.

They created the illusion of a great fight in fandom, when the title was still selling much better than it did under Gerard Jones and Hal- and how come Jones never gets criticism for writing Hal so badly in the first place?

Everyone knows that G'Nort is the greatest Green Lantern of them all. All of the others? Crap.

Did Hal Jordan, John Stewart, Guy Gardner or any of the other Lanterns, let alone the Guardians, stop Mister Nebula or the Scarlet Skier from redecorating the Earth? HELL NO! None of them would have stood a chance against the awesome villainy of those foes.

Hal would've been OK if they hadn't tried to revise him into a solo hero & write out the Guardians & the Corps in the late 1980's/early 1990's (end of Green Lantern Corps & the Action Comics Weekly strip). The Silver Age Green Lantern had an extremely silly "magic-hat" power with science-doesn't-work-like-that weakness, but the space stuff was keeping it afloat. When they tried to make it more Earth-based after COIE, it lost a lot of its charm & fell apart. But it seems like some editors saw Hal as the ONE TRUE Green Lantern & the rest as Bizarro-Lanterns.

Or something.

That's why I mock Hal.

Kyle I don't mind. He was a redesign, somewhat as Hal was before him; & once they had him established they could have finally gotten rid of the "yellow impurity" thing with a retcon.

Great post! I'm a big Green Lantern fan, but got into it One Year Later, and worked backwards devouring all the back issues and trades I could find. And as such, I don't see why the lanterns can't all co-exist.

Besides, I think that with all the death and resurrection imagery they've surrounded Kyle with, they've unwittingly set her up as his perfect mate. Come on, she would laugh in the face of his "Ladyfriend death curse," and be able to top any grisly tale of fridges he could tell.

Drtsky Rrrr people.Created by Alan Moore, so he's got a famous pedigree, he has no known personality flaws, and:He's an abstract mathmatical progression with super powers!No-one else can match that one.

Me, I always wanted to someday do a GLCorps issue spotlighting my personal favorite hero. It'd be the Green Lanterns vs. a souped-up Doctor Light, who blinds them all with high-intensity white light projected straight into their optic nerves. Deprived of sight, the Lanterns have difficulty using their powers, and all seems lost, until they hear:

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